Watch The Light Between Oceans ((TOP))

The Light Between Oceans is a 2016 romantic drama film written and directed by Derek Cianfrance and based on the 2012 novel of the same name by M. L. Stedman. An international co-production between the United Kingdom, the United States, India and Canada, the film stars Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz, Bryan Brown, and Jack Thompson. The film tells the story of a lighthouse keeper and his wife who rescue an infant girl adrift at sea and raise her as their own. Years later, the couple discover the child's true parentage and are faced with the consequences of their actions.

Watch The Light Between Oceans

The book is also set 100 years ago, after WWI. This allowed for better isolation with technology very limited, almost completely restricting communication between the lighthouse and coast. It also meant that there are some incredibly dramatic moments but those I will let you discover for yourself.

Director Derek Cianfrance previously made Blue Valentine, a time-scrambled tale of love gone wrong, and The Place Beyond the Pines, a multi-generational crime saga. In the past, he has favored an intense, often furious brand of imagery that uses showy technique to approximate deep human emotion without ever quite arriving at real humanity. (Feel Ryan Gosling's pain! Feel it!) But here, Cianfrance has found material that complements him well, because the stripped-down story forces him to put his visual style to good use. He does wonders with closeups from behind, in three-quarter profile, setting the relationships between his leads off-kilter in subtle ways. And because setting your movie on an island is a waste if you can't bathe everything in natural light, he turns the film (shot on Tasmania and New Zealand) into magic-hour playtime.

Blue Valentine (2010) likewise sparked a real-life romance between its leads, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, and is comparably hard to watch as it illustrates the deterioration of a relationship and features less-than-likable characters. But Gosling and Williams are able to portray the whisperings of a couple newly in love and the shouts and silences of a relationship at its bitter end. The dynamic between Fassbender and Vikander in The Light Between Oceans lacks a necessary passion to drive the film. In this onscreen love story, there is no relatable spark or magic. The wedding scene between Tom and Isabel comes the closest to displaying some sort of warmth, but it is short-lived. 041b061a72